With market cap of ~$3.6B and TEV of ~$1.4B — cash and investments plus net working capital accounts for 95% of the current market capitalization.

This excludes any value for net PP&E or intellectual property.

So…for 5% of market cap – $180M – you get $2.7B of net PP&E and a bunch of patents that are probably worthless but have a book value of $3.3B. What are the chances that RIM’s property, plant and equipment and all their intellectual property are worth more than $180M? Given a book value of $6B, I’d say the odds are good.

Cash, investments, working capital, pp&e, and intangibles = $9.4B at book value. Market cap = $3.6B. Throw all the inventory in the trash and donate the intellectual property to goodwill or a museum, and you’re still at $5.1B.

This ignores the fact that some international markets are still quite strong and the company still produces cash. Despite all the bad figures, RIM made $2.8B of operating cash flow in the twelve months ended June 2012 (that’s 2x it’s enterprise value).

If RIM’s technology and franchise are hopeless, which it sounds like they are, then management is nefariously robbing its shareholders by chasing a lost cause.

There is enough value in the assets and the cigarette butt of earnings to easily double or triple the market cap.

Blackstone or KKR should buy RIM and stop management’s value destructive exploits.

BBM has bled users except perhaps overseas.

Who will adopt BBM unless most of their contacts are using it (Hint:Hardly anyone)?

Carriers in the USA are moving away from SMS packages (See: Verizon new plans).

I believe BBM may have value for the technology but that it’s far less than thought and not enough to make it a viable standalone entity.

The big issue now for RIM is a sale to a non-friendly foreign based company will probably result in the loss of most or all government users.

Will QNX ever be again available for commercial users?

Might that be a business worth spinning out of RIM, or being acquired by some company already in a related business, such as Harman International Industries who owned QNX before RIM?

It was 2010 not 2012.
RIM could have gone the incremental route of taking QNX and
combine with their Java stack but they didn’t.
- However Playbook does use version of QNX but that didn’t help in any way.
- Microsoft is out unless RIM can port their Java code.
- I think they also tried AIR route as well as HTML5 both didn’t work.
- RIM still has shot with Intel and Oracle. only question is can they get dual core procs, GPUs, LTE chips, screens, etc. cheaply.
- Everyone in the industry knows that all these guys are reverse
engineering Apple’s APIs in clean room and no copyright suit is going to protect that.
(error fixed – thanks. FF)

Except RIM all the software of the smartphones companies headquarters are now based in the USA. Since this country is not immune to abuse of dominant position, just look at megaupload or even wikileak, why the rest of the world stay put? Or there are informations that we can yet access?

And now, 5 years later almost to the week, Nokia issues a warning to investors outlining worsening losses, falling sales and mass firings, whilst RIM quarterly accounts show the first ever loss, falling sales and mass firings.

Sounds like poetic justice to me!

My gut feeling is that RIM is dead very soon. The real question is, will anyone notice or care?